Monthly Archives: March 2009

Since we’re planning to use TiddlyDocs internally, we’re in need of some high-level documentation for TiddlyDocs in order to have it approved for certain uses.

My starting point was to locate, solicit, or produce documentation for TiddlyWiki and TiddlyWeb, the technologies on which TiddlyDocs is based.

For TiddlyWiki, useful sources are:

Position Paper Although it’s technically a position paper for an event on device access, Paul Downey has done a great job of overviewing TiddlyWiki from both a high-level and technical perspective.

TiddlyWiki Internals Series I wrote this when I joined Osmosoft, so a caveat is that my knowledge of TiddlyWiki was at the time limited. OTOH it’s the only detailed dive of the internals I’m aware of.

Community Wiki Scouring around the official community wiki is another way to find a lot of useful info, particularly about the API.

For TiddlyWeb, there are less third-party sources, but fortunately its creator Chris Dent puts a lot of effort into writing detailed notes. These are notes shipped with the code itself, notes on the TiddlyWeb wiki, and even some very useful notes in commit messages. Most recently, Chris has been producing some excellent doco at here, inside the wiki.

For TiddlyDocs, Simon has produced a nice new screencast on TiddlyDocs with animations. Video quality needs some polishing, which we’ll do in later versions, but he’s done a great job motivating the product:

I recently attended Rewired State with several fellow Osmosofties. Our group (Simon, Fred, Jeremy, Robbie and myself) developed a little mashup called Moving There (and a couple of other things not described here).

After the demos, our mashup was mentioned by a representative from DirectGov as one of several projects they’d like to work with, perhaps to sponsor further work.

The idea was to overlay government-related data on property listings sites. I’ve been moving house right now, so this is very much an itch which I’d very much like to scratch.

There’s a lot of things they don’t show you too, like upcoming building works, local schools, crime stats, vandalism. All these things are available in one form or another on websites, some operated by the government and others by third parties.

One part of our work involved taking in a postcode and producing useful info about it, so we came up with a little library for that. We also made some attempt to normalise these metrics, so we came up with a “coolness factor” between 0 and 1. This is very crude, but we feel it’s useful when comparing stats to say “schools have a coolness factor of 0.3 and crime prevention is 0.6” rather than “schools have an average pass rate of 48% and there are 142 crimes per week”. In other words, a standard coolness factor measure goes some way towards helping you compare apples with oranges.

But the real product concerned itself with mashing up a properties listing site. After entering a location, you get back listings as well as charts showing the “coolness” factor according to the various stats. Well, that’s the theory; in this case, it’s just one stat (fixmystreet local incidents, e.g. vandalism) per property. And the UI isn’t particularly slick either! I’m just presenting where we got to when the time ran out on the day!

A few notes on the technology. We made use of JQuery for the usual infrastructural stuff. We used Google’s geo-coding API to map street name and suburbs into a postcode. The postcode info demo and the final mashup are actually a file-based web app, i.e. it runs off a file:// URI. We debated several models for the mashup’s architecture; in retrospect, we spent a lot of time re-building the property search’s UI and it might have been better to go with a Greasemonkey overlay, at least for proof-of-concept.

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G’Day

Welcome to Michael Mahemoff's blog, soapboxing on software and the web since 2004. I'm presently using HTML5 and the web to make podcasts easier to share, play, and discover at Player FM. I've previously worked at Google and Osmosoft, and built the Ajax Patterns wiki and corresponding book, "Ajax Design Patterns" (O'Reilly 2006).
For avoidance of doubt, I'm not a female, nor ever have been to my knowledge. The title of this blog alludes to English As She Is Spoke, a book so profoundly flawed it reminded me of the maturity of the software industry when this blog began in 2004. I believe the industry has become more sophisticated since then, particularly the importance of UX.
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